The Romance of the Woods

"Two coveys," says Jemmie; "the willow-grouse have a passion for massing even in the chicken stage," which is perfectly true, while in the autumn you may find a community of a hundred of them living together.

Now were these birds little white ghosts, or real flesh and blood and feathers? If not spectres, then where are they? This was the question we asked of one another as, for a full hour, we paced and repaced, as we believed, every inch of a square half mile of ground within which the little wizards must inevitably be somewhere hidden. Hermann explained the matter by declaring that they had settled altogether in a huddled mass, and had not moved a muscle since; knowing, perhaps instinctively, that by preserving absolute immobility they would give no scent. We may, and so may the dogs, have passed within a yard of the hole or tuft in which the beady-eyed little creatures lay crouched, watching us, scarcely breathing for terror, their poor hearts and pulses going very fast as we come near and pass by and see no sign of them.

But Carlow has the luck to stumble upon them. I am watching the dog, and I see him stop suddenly in his mad career (Carlow's career is always mad!), and bend over in an extraordinary position. There is the covey, under his very nose. Alarmed, indeed, they are now, and their necks are held straight and high; they attempt no further concealment; their only anxiety is how to take wing without falling into the jaws of this ogre—fox or whatever he may be. Carlow would sooner perish than touch one of them; but they do not know this, poor things, and peer helplessly and timidly this way and that in the extremity of terror and uncertainty. I can examine them now at leisure for a moment or two, and oh! what beautiful creatures they are. Where was ever so soft a brown as this of theirs, or so pure a white? What bird ever matched the graceful poise of their heads? What—there! they are off, and I have missed them with both barrels; this comes of moralising. Jemmie did not moralise, and he has dropped two of the beauties; but there is a chance for me yet, for the covey has settled in the open, no doubt about the exact spot this time, and not more than one hundred and fifty yards away.

So we take in all the dogs excepting old Kaplya, who is as safe and steady as the Rock of Gibraltar, and head straight for the place in which we believe the birds to be lying. Old Kaplya raises her nose, half turns towards us, smiles and winks (she positively does both), as though she would say, "All right, keep your eye upon Kaplya; I'm on these birds already—follow me!" and away she goes straight as a line, first cantering easily, then trotting a few yards, then cautiously walking as many more, then slowly stopping, stiffening, turning her nose now slightly to this side, now to that, then finally fixing herself into the very perfect picture of a sure point.

Up they go, and off go my two barrels, rather too rapidly and excitedly; off go Jemmie's also, but with more deliberation. To my first shot a bird falls in tatters; to my second two succumb. I have shot three of them, and Jemmie his usual brace. But, alas! my first bird is but a mangled mass of feathers and broken bones, and there must be a burial. Hide him deep beneath the moss and heather, Hermann, and for pity's sake say no more about the circumstance; for in truth my heart is like wax within me by reason of this wasted life. It is pardonable and right, though perhaps regrettable, to take these lives when we intend to use the shot-riddled carcases for our food, but to blow a beautiful creature to pieces and to be obliged to bury its remains is unpardonable.

We decide to leave the rest of this covey; we have levied sufficient tribute upon it. And now the day is growing into middle age, and Jemmie says that we will find one more family of willow-grouse or blackgame and then take our mid-day meal and our siesta. We will diverge into the thick belt of forest on the right, he says, and see if we can find a covey of capercailzies.

I long to see another capercailzie before I die. For many a year I have been absent from those moors whereon the great king of game-birds holds his high court. Oh! if I could but come face to face—but once—with the royal family, I could return to far-off England content.

But, alas! the king was not to be found. Deep in the sanctuary of mid-forest, somewhere beyond those tall, dark pines—perhaps miles away—he had listened in proud disdain to the popping of our cartridges upon the moor, and had laughed at our impotent endeavours to outwit himself and his family of princelings. To-morrow, likely enough, he would stalk about the moor from end to end, he and the long-legged princes and princesses, his sons and daughters, and the haughty lady his queen; but to-day, no, thank you! Not while James and his deadly Holland were about!

We stumbled, however, upon a covey of blackgame, and levied full tribute upon them in default of their big cousins; but now the splendid August sun had

"Clomb up to heaven and kissed the golden feet of noon,"

and Jemmie declared that if we did not instantly settle down to our legitimate lunch, he would not answer for it if he suddenly fell upon me, or Hermann, or Shammie, or even perspiring Stepan and devoured him. Accordingly, therefore, we selected our camp in a shady spot by a moss-pool—for this bog-water was all that we should get to-day, and we must use it or none for tea-making—and Hermann was instructed to unpack the luncheon basket. Out came the good things, a profuse and welcome procession of luxury—spring chickens, tongue, well-iced butter, two bottles of claret, Alexander Kuchen (oh! blessed Alexander, whoever you may have been, to have invented so delicious a dainty; may the sweet maidens of Valhalla feed you for ever with your own Kuchen, oh Alexander! and may you eat heartily of it without suffering or surfeiting), and arctic strawberries. For half an hour we toyed, did James and I, with the viands, after which for two hours we slept or rested; for during this time of high noon the birds mysteriously disappear, and nor man nor dog may find them; and I lay and dreamed dreams, a few sleeping and many waking ones; and the peace and silence and restfulness of that mid-day in the forest entered into my soul and abode there in a sense of infinite and lasting content, which may be recalled—as through a phonograph—and reproduced at will to this hour.

And then again, after a cup of tea concocted of bog-water, but delicious notwithstanding, and after counting and recounting our twelve or thirteen brace of victims, we pulled ourselves together and trudged for four more hours, during which time we doubled our tale of slaughter, or nearly so, and when the moment came that we must head for the carts and return home to dine and catch the night train for town, it was with sadness that we wended our way homewards. We had spent twelve hours upon this pleasant moor indeed; but who would be content with twelve? Twelve thousand were all too little of such delight. On mature reflection I am quite determined that if my friends the Mahatmas give me another dream-chance I shall jump at the offer of Erinofka as a place of abode, however long the sentence be. What if the spirit-gun will not go off? So long as I may tramp the heather and see the game and carry over my shoulder the semblance of a gun to point at it, even a dummy gun; so long as I may see the dew-pearled gossamer, and feel the broad smile of the August sun, and hear the hum and buzz and crackle and cluck of teeming life around me, I really do not think I care so very much about the killing. And this is why I declare that if the Mahatmas again offer me the Erinofka heaven I shall accept it, ay, even unto forty-five thousand years! Nevertheless, if they allow me a breechloader and cartridges instead of that foolish spirit-gun of theirs, I shall certainly shoot.

  CHAPTER II
IN AMBUSH AT THE LAKE-SIDE

It is spring—such spring as is vouchsafed to the high latitudes, and I am in my night ambush, prepared to welcome any living thing that is good enough to come forth from its sanctuary within reeds or forest, and to parade itself in the open for my inspection. My ambush is a pine-branch tent, or shalashka, the little edifice which has been my refuge and centre of observation for many a cold northern night—spring-time nights, indeed, but nights of more degrees of frost than the sportsman or naturalist of temperate Britain has dreamed of in his coldest excursions into the realms of imagination. My tent on this occasion is not pitched upon one of those open spaces in mid-forest, whereon the blackcock love to hold their nocturnal or early-matutinal tournaments, where the laughing willow-grouse—that faithful lover—sports with his pretty white mate, and the dark forest trees form a romantic background to the proceedings of both. To-night I am placed in the midst of the marshy approach to a wide sheet of water—an annex, in fact, to the great Lake Ladoga. Fifty yards or more in front of me the waters, but lately released from their entire subjection to the yoke of winter, may be heard softly lapping the shore in a series of gentle kisses, stolen in the darkness; for it is but three in the morning—if that, and I can see nothing but the broad wing of Night still stretched over land and lake. On either side of the shalashka there extends, I believe, a spur of moorland; behind is the forest: never far away in a Russian landscape.

I am still in the dreamy, semi-conscious condition superinduced by the long ride through gloom and silence which has intervened between supper last evening, twenty miles away, and my arrival here. The little ponies to whom we are indebted for our conveyance in perfect safety, through darkness which even the marvellous eyes of a Finn pony could hardly have penetrated, are some little way off behind us, hidden among the pine trees, waiting with the philosophic content of their tribe until it shall have pleased us to accomplish the object of our nightly pilgrimage and return to them.

The Finn pony, good, faithful soul, accepts everything at his master's hands with unquestioning docility and good temper; he is never surprised or annoyed; never taken aback by an obstacle in his way, but rather sets himself to seek out the best means to circumvent such obstacle. If his master happens to be drunk or asleep, this is a matter of supreme indifference to the little animal between the shafts of the inebriate's cart or beneath his saddle, for he is perfectly able and ready to manage the whole business of getting himself and his master safely home, without the slightest interference from the latter. One of the canniest and best of animals, one of the handiest of the servants of mankind and the most faithful and reliable of his friends, is the Finn pony; and I am glad indeed to be able to put this fact forward, and thus do a good turn for a little-known hero among those who are not personally acquainted with his claims to that title.

Asleep at my side is Ivan, and Ivan is—I am delighted to say—too tired or too considerate to snore; I do not care which it is so long as he does not play his usual nocturnal tunes and spoil this dreamy unreality in which I am steeped. I am here to take notes; but what notes can a man take when, not only is there nothing to be seen, and nothing to be heard—save the gentle plash of the lake, but when he is not even convinced of the fact that he is himself, or at all events that he is awake and not dreaming? Such is my condition at present. Everything seems far, far away. My old self, my own history, even the point of time, three hours ago by the things we used to call watches, when I left the lodge and started upon my long, dark, silent ride—seems to be separated from me by an eternity of space and tranquil, incidentless existence. What shall I do to pass away the next hour or two? Sleep? Heaven forbid—the stillness is too good for that! Review my past? Heaven forbid again—nothing half so unpleasant! Whatever I do must be done in consciousness and must be connected with the immediate present or the future; no ghostly past shall be admitted into the sanctity of these hours. I shall recline and watch the dark plumage of night, and listen to her soft sounds of peace, and satisfaction, and maternity, as she broods over her nest and her little ones, until the hunter Day shall come and chase her from it, and drive her far away over the sea to her sanctuary beyond the eastern gates of the world.

And, first, what a marvellous thing is this darkness! Far away at home, in bed in one's own room, the darkness is nothing; because the bearings of each object in the chamber are known to you whether in light or darkness. You can, if you please, sit up in bed and point with the hand and say: "There is the window, and there the door, and there the wardrobe," and so on. But here, where I lie and stare out into the blackness, I can determine nothing of the million animate or inanimate objects around me; I may people the darkness with what beings I please until the light arrives; it is an area in which imagination may disport itself freely and there is none can contradict its tales, for who knows what bantlings may not be concealed here beneath the shelter of Mother Night's extended wings? How do I know that a company of elves are not disporting themselves within a yard or two of my tent—as ignorant of my proximity as I am of theirs? How can I tell that some dreadful wild beast is not, at this instant, feeling his way down to the waters of the lake, in order to allay his thirst after having feasted upon our poor ponies, behind there in the wood? I can imagine an interview between a ferocious bear or two gaunt wolves and our faithful little quadrupeds, whose one idea in life is to do their duty and eat the breakfast, each day, that the gods provide. I can see the wolves arrive and find the ponies, and say:

"Good evening, my friends; we regret to say you are required for our supper."

"That's impossible," the ponies reply; "we are needed to carry our masters home to Dubrofka."

"Oh, that's all right," say those wolves, to whom a lie is an unconsidered trifle; "your masters sent us on to tell you it was all arranged!" Whereupon the ponies believe the tale and are ready to be eaten, because it is part of the day's work as ordained by their master, which is another way of spelling God in their language.

I think I know pretty well, however, what I should see, or some of the things I should see, if an electric light were suddenly switched on and illuminated the ground around my tent. Close at hand, here, on the shingly sand at the edge of the lake, there are seven or eight or more little grey and white sandpipers, fast asleep—perhaps standing on one leg apiece—among the stones, which are so like them in tint that it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other, even by daylight. Then, somewhere within eye-shot, though maybe half a mile off, there is a flock of cranes standing, like a body of sentinels met to compare notes, or relieve guard, also probably employing but one leg each to balance themselves upon during the hours of repose. I wonder whether they use a different leg on alternate nights, or whether the same one is told off for night duty each time? If so, it is very hard indeed for the one limb thus employed to receive no share of the repose enjoyed by the rest of the body, but to be obliged to toil on night after night, and day after day, while its lazy fellow-limb gets all the rest and only half the work. But such is life. I am sure there are cranes near, for I heard their outposts give the alarm when we splashed through the marshy approach to this spot on our arrival here. Luckily Ivan knew the password, which was the grunt of an elk, as which animals—in search of a drink—we were permitted to come within the precincts of craneland without alarming the big grey birds to the departure point. In a very short time we shall hear them going through the business of waking up, and complaining of the hardship involved in keeping early hours. Then again, there are ducks, numbers of them, I feel sure of it, though not one of them has yet uttered a sound, because this place is a paradise for ducks, and Mother Night covers many a fond couple of them—paired by this time, and tasting the sweets of love and the lovely anticipations of nest-time and prospective flappers. Perhaps there is a pretty pair of tiny painted teal within a biscuit toss, little lovers nestling in a ridge of the coarse moorland, or amid the yellow grass which waves all around me, though I cannot see a blade. Perhaps they woke up when we came tramping by, and peered with long glossy neck outstretched, and beady eyes straining to pierce the gloom, on the very point of rising and disappearing together into the sanctuary of the darkness, but quieted down when we entered our shalashka, and ceased to approach their nestling place. Or a pair of snipe, or a ruff and a reeve, the former, at this season, a thing of exquisite beauty by reason of the Elizabethan ruff which gives him his name. Each male member of his family is furnished with one of these, and not one is like another in hue, though all are beautiful. They are of every conceivable tint and variety, and certainly metamorphose the bird completely, giving him the handsomest possible appearance so long as they last; but alas! when the courting days are over, and the fair one has capitulated to the beautiful besieging party,—presto!—his principal beauty exists no more, and he becomes without his noble collar, the dullest and least interesting of birds. Hard on the hen bird, I call it, and savouring of unfairness. How would Angelina like it were Edwin—the luxuriance or rakishness of whose moustaches or beard had been instrumental in captivating her affections—were Edwin, I say, to shave off those appendages so soon as her fond heart was fairly his own? If Angelina threw him over, under the circumstances, I am sure no one could blame her. But if the darkness is mysterious and wonderful, and full of subtle, hidden potentialities, what shall we say of the marvellous silence? The repose of it is almost too great. I feel at every instant as though something or somebody must suddenly break out into sound. Either the heavens themselves must—this moment or the next—burst forth into a great, grand chorus of divine music, or a bird must sing, or a beast roar. There is something in the air which must out; any sound would do, but a loud hymn would be the most satisfying at this instant. What a silence it is! The tension is oppressive when you come to listen to it, yet, if you were in the humour, how you could lean your very soul against it, and rest—and rest! But to-night I must have sound soon—my nerves demand it—I cannot bear this hush much longer; if no wolf howls within the next few minutes or no crane gives tongue, if no sandpiper whistles or duck quacks, I must wake Ivan and bid him talk. I am outside the beat of the willow-grouse, else he would have broken the oppressive spell an hour ago. Oh, for a chord of music! Oh, to hear on organ swell out, but for a moment, and then die away again; or to listen, close at hand, to the soul-deep song of the nightingale! Something is going to sound forth in a moment; I feel it—now—now! there!… I knew it must come just then, I had a presentiment of it. It is a snipe high up in the air, tracing his embroidery upon the sky-line overhead, and swooping at intervals with a sound as of a sheep's "baa;" this is the male snipe's curious way of wooing his mate; the "baa" comes dropping upon the ear at intervals of a few seconds. If that snipe had not come to save my reason I believe I should have shouted like a lunatic the next minute, which would assuredly have given Ivan a fit.

There goes a night-hawk, flitting by in the darkness like a ghost. Oh, what a voice! When he gives tongue I wish the silence back again. Go hence, noisy spirit of night, and hunt your moths elsewhere. No wonder you can scream loudly with a mouth like that, for when you open it your head seems to split in two pieces. There will be no more silence now; the night-jar has murdered sleep. Listen to the sentinel crane—or is it the boots or the chambermaid of the community awakening the family? He screams loudly to them, but they answer drowsily. "Have you not made a mistake in the time?" they are saying. "It cannot, surely, be time to get up yet?" It is though, Madame Crane, and you must quickly let down that other leg and see about the breakfast. In a minute or two there will be such a clamour of conversation among the crane community that any person within a radius of five miles will be aware of their presence. I should say that the cry of the crane is a better traveller than any other sound I have heard. These birds require a good voice for communicating with one another during flight, for a large flock will often separate into many little bands of two or three while on the "march," and the straggling units must be picked up by nightfall. They must have strayed far away indeed if they cannot hear when their friends hail them at the full pitch of the crane-voice!

Now comes another sound. Far away at first, but nearing at each repetition. A sad, melancholy note, falling at intervals of a second or two. I have heard it often before, and wondered what it could be. I have heard it as they who produced it—whoever they might be—passed at night far above the sleeping city, and have felt a great pity for the sad wandering spirits flying and wailing through the darkness—whither? Perhaps they were the souls of the unbaptized, I have thought, which must wander, according to a Slavonic tradition, over land and sea for seven years, seeking and entreating to be baptized.

But Ivan does not allow my thoughts to wander into folk-lore this night. The cranes have awakened him, and he has heard this last mysterious sound also. It has excited him. His finger is at his lip, and he is listening. "What is it, Ivan? Speak!"

"Hush!" says Ivan. "This is what we came for!" (There was a raison d'être for our presence here; I forgot to mention this circumstance before.) "It is the geese!"

So this is the wild geese arriving! Then beat, heart, and strain, eyes, through the darkness, for this is an exciting moment. Not that there is the remotest chance of a shot at them at present; but it is enough if they alight close at hand and tarry, breakfasting, until daylight doth appear. How close the sound seems in the still air, and yet the birds may be a mile away! I can hear the slow, measured beat of their great wings as they approach, a solid phalanx, conversing quietly at short intervals. Surely they are very close indeed? They are all talking at once now. Perhaps they have seen the water and are excited, knowing that their journey is at an end. The beating of their wings seems almost to brush now the topmost boughs of the shalashka. I fancy I can feel a movement in the air, fanned by their big pinions. Thud! There goes the leader; he has alighted. Thud again—and yet again! It is true—they are here; they have come!

To judge from the noises which they are making, there must be a considerable number arrived—thirty or forty. They are chattering to one another happily and sociably, and uttering very different tones from those weird, melancholy cries of theirs while on the wing. They are no longer the lost spirits, the poor wandering unbaptized souls, but a party of merry travellers just arrived, so to speak, at the tavern where a comfortable breakfast is spread all ready for them. They are sure to do justice to it, for this is their favourite feeding-ground—all over this marsh, so Ivan says. It is growing lighter. The conglomeration of sounds of life seems to have startled the Night, and reminded her that she must hurry away and attend to her duties in another hemisphere. She is gradually withdrawing her soft wings—those dark and motherly wings which have guarded so well her little ones for many a long silent hour. Go in peace, Mother Night, for the broad Sun will take good care of your bantlings during your absence. He will open upon them his "good gigantic smile," and they shall laugh and sing and be merry. Already I can catch a pale, sickly gleam of light, where the Waters look up to the grey sky and cry, "How long, Sun, how long the gloom and the cold?"

Be silent, lake, for soon the bridegroom will arrive, and you shall bedeck your waters with gems, and sparkle and glitter in leagues of dancing delight.

The sandpipers are merry and active, and dart from place to place in pairs and companies, whistling and rejoicing; they pass, now and again, so close to me that I can see them, and their whistling seems to come from the very air within the shalashka. And the snipe overhead, he never tires of his lightning-flight and his wheeling; and his "baa" is one of the sounds which continues without ceasing. There is yet another voice—a croak and then a whistle, and the same repeated farther away, and yet again in the distance: a woodcock, I believe, but I cannot see him. He is taking his spring-flight, followed or preceded by his spouse. They will flit across a given space, then alight and dally awhile in pretty courtship, then return the way they came; and so again, da capo.

What are those tall posts yonder, outlining themselves against the paling sky? They are motionless, apparently—no, they move, as I stare through the uncertain light; they shorten, and lengthen, and bend, and dip, and glide slowly forward and bend again: it is the cranes, I am sure of it, for the clamour seems to come from that very spot. But where are the geese? I can hear them but they are still invisible, for they are feeding head down, and show no outline against the sky. Listen! another band of melancholy air-wanderers is approaching—how weird, how pathetic is the sound of their coming! Do they then so hate the trouble of travelling? or is it merely that they have discovered which tone and note of the gamut carries furthest through the ether, and that this happens to be the most doleful of all notes? They are very close now—stay! What is this? are they not going to alight and join the happy breakfast-party below there? Apparently not: they are overhead, they have passed, they have gone on—I can see them; they are travelling in wedge-like formation, a big triangle of beating wings that flog the air with measured sound and slow. How deliberate and yet how swift and powerful is their flight! Why did they not stop here? Their cry was answered from below, and yet they did not pause but continued on their course. Why was the invitation to breakfast not accepted? Who can say what is the etiquette of the wild goose? Perhaps it was not an invitation, but rather an intimation that this place—this tavern—was already occupied by a rival community.

One or two of my former friends take wing and join the other party; no doubt they have some reason for this step, but what that reason is no man may conjecture. Perhaps they are scouts sent forward to find out who these new arrivals are; perhaps they have been badly treated here and have gone over to the enemy in order to "better themselves." Luckily the bulk of the party remain behind, however; and now, in the strengthening light, I can plainly see a body of stout grey fellows waddling about among the yellow grasses and the soaked moss, and feeding in the well-known manner of geese in any field in far-off England. Forty yards, I reckon, separates my shalashka from the nearest goose: one of them may wander nearer—it is worth while to be patient and to allow the light to intensify before hazarding a shot which will disperse every living creature within hearing, and end the delight with which this spring morning is stored.

Slowly the sky, due east, yellows and then reddens; it seems to be shooting up pink cloudlets, and letting them fly over heaven in order to herald the uprising of the King of Morning; for the Sun is coming—there can be no doubt of it! Redder and redder are the clouds that precede him; now the mists that veil his bed are growing golden and radiant, and fly right and left as he pushes his head through them and looks out upon the earth, and smiles in a broad pathway across the lake. As though by magic a thousand song birds instantly fill the air with hymns of praise; even the tall cranes cease their gabbling and gobbling, and look for a moment at the apparition ere they resume the business of the hour. They are splashing about in shallow water, and each step they make throws a shower of bright gems around them. The geese—hungry no doubt after a long journey, and being naturally rather of a practical than of a romantic turn of mind, take but little notice of the Sun-god; he's all right, they think, and is sure to turn up at daybreak every morning, surely one need not interrupt one's breakfast to look up at him? The pace is too good! Look at the ducks—here a pair and there a pair—swimming out into the shining water, dipping their heads as they go and sending diamond-baths over the sheen of their necks and shoulders. They pursue one another, and quack and court, and bathe, and are perfectly and entirely happy and content, as who would not be in their place? A curlew sails by, calling to its mate, who is circling over the lake further to the left. And all the while the busy little company of sandpipers flit and whistle, and alight and run, and are off again on the wing—life is all movement and 'go' for them; they cannot be still.

There is an osprey! He is floating motionless in air, high over the lake. He, too, is thinking of breakfast. Soon he will drop like a bolt from heaven, disappear entirely or partially in the wave, and in a moment reappear with his meal safely held in those business-like talons of his. There he goes—splash! he has missed his mark. A cry of rage, and a circle or two over the water, and he is aloft again—hanging like an impending doom over the bright lake. He will not miss again! But Ivan is touching my arm: I know what he means: he means that I must blot out this picture of peace and life by sending a message of grim death and noisy ruin into the very midst of it. Let me wait awhile, Ivan, and watch. It is so little for you who live amid all this and can see it at any time; but it is so much to me—a dweller in towns, where there is no free, happy nature-life to watch and feast upon, and no daybreak save that of the London cat and the strident, brazen cock. Give me another hour of it, Ivan? No? Well, half an hour? But Ivan says "No;" the geese may depart at any moment, he whispers; shoot while you can! I have no doubt Ivan made a mental addition, "and don't be a sentimental English idiot;" but the former words were all I was permitted to hear. So there is nothing for it: I must shoot; I must, with my own hand, blot out all this beauty, and smudge the picture which Morning has painted for my delight—and all to see a grey goose flutter and die who is now so busy and happy! The game is not worth the candle; but it must be done! One shot as they stand, says pitiless Ivan, and another as they rise—unless I prefer to hazard a cartridge after one of yonder cranes. Crane me no cranes: it is goose or nothing; give me the gun, Ivan!